Sebastian Early Anthony Payne

I have made several posts in the past with this title but as you may have guessed, I'm off to London on today to see the Eagles at the O2 Arena. In the past few months, the band have become one of my favourites and are very high in recent my last.fm rankings as you can see. The tickets weren't cheap but I am very much looking forward to the show and the reviews so far are very encouraging.

I will also be staying Wednesday night and having a day of fun in London - something I have wanted to do for years - visiting places like Tate Modern, Battersea Power Station, The Photographers Gallery as well as the usual favourites like the Apple Store and Buckingham Palace. If you have any suggestions on places to visit in London, then let me know!

Finally, on the Habari front, 0.4.1 is triggering up for release, Michael is continuing to make progress on Monolith and despite the progress made with WordPress 2.5 on the Administration interface, I continue to love Habari and have great hopes for the future. It's so easy and clean to use...

As I near the date of leaving for London (tomorrow), I thought I would suggest some fantastic Eagles songs I have discovered while exploring their back catalogue in preparation for seeing them live.

• The Sad Café (from The Long Run) - Known to Eagles fans as a hidden classic, this song was the last material to heard until 1994 with Get Over It. Being a Henley/Walsh/Fray/Souther composition, it is some of the best songwriting Don has ever done and includes everything you want from an Eagles song. Soft singing and precise drumming with touching lyrics. Finished off with a saxophone solo by David Sanbourn, it makes a lovely finish to an album full of hard rocking songs and deep cutting issues. Like Hotel California, it's up to you to decide what the song is about and how it relates to you personally.
• My Man (from On The Border) - In the vain of their early sound, this is an atypical country-rock song, driven by acoustic guitar with light drumming and slide guitar to brighten the mood. A tribute by then-Eagle Bernie Leadon to Gram Parsons (who had recently passed away at that time), the song will touch anyone who has suffered the loss of a close friend. The immortal line "and we who must remain, go on living just the same" is awfully special. I can not think of another song that expresses this so eloquently (Tears In Heaven comes close), My Man is a gem of a song which has never been performed by the band.
• Journey of a Sorcerer (from One of These Nights) - The track is most commonly associated with 'Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy' but I can honestly say I have never heard it until I played it from the album, not being a science fiction fan. Space and country music have rarely been pushed together but this song shows it can be done. Driven by a banjo, strings and slide-guitar, it makes a top notch instrumental to chillax to, even if it is an uncommon path for the band. Sonic experimentation I believe is the term for such songs

That ends today's music thoughts. I've just purchased The Zutons' Tired of Hanging Around and absolutely love some of the songs on it. Expect a write up or a mention in the future. The album came out just before my interest in music really began to flourish, hence the delay in finding it. Good music and good songwriting - not something you see cobbled together in modern music. They are recording a new album so hopefully I may see them on tour soon.

When I arrived back at Durham from the Christmas break, this was what the Purple Radio office looked like

A horrendous state of old servers, old Sun workstations, boxes, cables, CRT monitors and general computing rubbish. Most visitors would comment 'was this a radio station or an IT lab' - I have wondered this myself. Slowly over Epiphany term, the situation has improved by binning lots of rubbish, cannibalising computers to get the useful bits out and seeing what isn't needed. On the last few days of term, Jake and Graham from the IT & Systems team went in with myself for a big dumping session. My uncle and I then took 12 old systems, two G3 iMacs and a laser printer to the local dump 'household waste recycling centre' and things were looking much better. All of these systems were either beyond repair or too old to be any use to anyone. Recycling them would have been better but no one was interested in them.

Over the holidays, I have been buying posters and tomorrow, I'm traveling back to start decorating with the help of some friends. Instead of the light blue, we are going magnolia with should brighten up the place and look cleaner. Expect some more photos soon of a much friendlier office (with a kettle and toaster to boot!). On another note, if anyone has any old equipment they don't need, please let me know as we may be able to use it. Monitors (flat screens), servers, desktops, RAM - anything really can be useful.

When I get 'into' a band, I tend to explore their artiste's solo collections. Done this with Pink Floyd and now I'm doing the same with with The Eagles. Don Henley and Glenn Frey (drummer and guitarist, both lead songwriters) have had successful solo careers with Henley edging in front of Frey on sales and public exposure. Both of their music is full of hard, 80s guitar and synth driven rock which is awesome in my eyes and

The best place to begin for Don is Actual Miles, a greatest hits collection that includes a selection of songs from his first three albums, including such awesome tracks as Dirty Laundry, All She Wants To Do Is Dance, The Boys of Summer and The End of Innocence. His voice is instantly recognisable the same as Hotel California but the music is quite different - harder, funkier and certainly pop orientated. Pop is not something The Eagles ever aimed for.

On the Fray side, he hasn't released a collection of his hits which leaves you either buying several albums or getting individual songs for online sources. If it was this, I'd go for Smuggler's Blues, You Belong To The City, Sexy Girl and Brave New World. They are all different, enjoyable to listen and showcase a different side of 'the lone arranger'. The latter two hits are very pop orientated and both climbed their way up the Billboard 200 in the 80s but Sexy Girl is reminiscent of the Eagles with a soft moving, almost bouncing beat. Brave New World is idealistic to say the least.

Joe Walsh deserves a post of his own but that's for another day. If you ever listened to music radio, chances are high you will have heard of Rocky Mountain Way - a typical example of 70s rock. Out of the artists, either Walsh or Henley have experienced the most successful career and it's more up your individual tastes to decide which has the better songs. Thankfully for us all, the '14 year vacation' did them all good and they are back on top with Long Road Out Of Eden and UK tour coming soon. Long Live The Eagles...

Ever since I began fiddling around with Linux and 'all that shizzle' in 2004, I have mainly used WordPress for my site, with a few diversions into RapidWeaver, Tumblr, MovableType and Blogger along the way. I have enjoyed using it but I feel it is time for a change. Some great blogs use WordPress but I felt something simpler, cleaner and slicker was needed to reinvigorate myself. The administration interface needs sprucing up badly (and no, the 2.5 revamp isn't what I was meaning) and I find it dull, boring and not a good writing environment. MovableType was my first choice but it's huge (the codebase is around 5mb compared to that of 1.5mb of WordPress) and requires playing about with Perl and I really enjoy life too much to spend time doing this.

While reading a few articles about MovableType 4.1, I found a link to Habari and I think I've found a match made in heaven. Habari was started over a year ago by a few prominent WordPress contributors (for one reason and another) and it is now in a good enough shape to make a proper blog of it as I already have. Over the past few days, I've been adopting my Tumblr theme and it's now ready for you all to see. The Admin interface is pure bliss - no extra buttons, just a plain box that lets the words blow. Reminds me of WriteRoom in this aspect.

Habari isn't right for everyone - those who want a fancy blogging system that does everything best stick with Ol' WordPress with its millions of plugins but if you want something easy to theme, a growing and well organised community, a clean admin interface and very quick load times then you should take a look at Habari. My coding skills aren't up the point where I would want to fix bugs but documentation, screencasts, bug reporting and general evangelism is somewhere I could actually help and this is something I plan to do, if my contributions will be welcome of course!

This post was brought to you by Actual Miles, Henley's Greatest Hits, in particular The End on Innocence and All She Wants To Do Is Dance.